Marioman

I had the most fun when people could make bank spreeing with turrets ($ reward based on bounty), could spam bricks/thors, buy those 'damage zones' that were rectangular areas that did damage, and could buy instant respawning for like 250,000 money. This was probably around 2007 when brickwarp and deathboyevil played. I didn't really like the resets, or any of the changes that came after that where I had to fly to some safe in zone 8 to buy items. Dunno if anyone will recall but I believe that i'm the guy who first paired the high speed, terrible thrust, amazing afterburn thruster in wb with the string of pearls (no bombs but like 20 lvl 1 mines with almost no minedelay). I was so based in that ship hehe. And anyone could win flag games solo at that time, often by hiding the flags in that blue ice base or up top in center! Haha yeah now I realize I was probably kinda dumb with sticking to the vanilla continuum flag graphics. Anyway the settings at that time were so fun imo, there was an amazing amount of viability with the different configurations... people could even duel with vastly different setups and win if they played to their strengths. I also had a cloak spider with shredder (superfast lvl 1 bullets), energy view, and space mines that I loved playing in center. I also had a lanc that wasn't setup for basing but instead decent energy/recharge that I had for turreting in center. Now I remember, this was when bullet damage to turrets only affected the turreter, and only bomb/thor damage affected turretees. Really awesome back then, some amazing ideas and stuff you did with ASSS brain... thanks for the great memories

Going to be testing the powerball prac bot today and tomorrow. The bot's very much in development and nothing's set in stone so everyone please feel welcome to criticize. Slowly getting feedback from people -- one person told me he didn't like the limited team size and player queue. Right now how it works is that there's a queue: players use !next, !remove, and !showline commands to enter/exit/see the queue respectively. When they are next in queue and a spot opens up in the game they have 15 seconds to enter using !sub. You can't choose which team to sub in on. Winning team stays in. I know last weekend's event was less than stellar, yes I was hosting it, sorry for the hiccups! Hopefully will go smoother this time.

Thank you nude i edited it. you are very welcome to play.

Updated site (with some unfinished work that I wasn't planning on pushing), reason: I put this new feedback thing in the bottom right, use that to submit ideas/feedback on powerball league. This thread will just be me posting updates on development (until the forums ded lol). Ok so powerball prac bot is almost complete. Powerball league bot will be 90% of the pracbot with minor changes so it will be easy (e.g. remove queuing with next, no team balancing, and other teams related stuff). Some info on the bot. Stats that are currently being tracked for players: Death, Kill, Pressure, Steal, Turnover, and Ballcarry. Not implemented yet: Goal, Assist, Save. About pressure -- players will be awarded a pressure if they kill the current ball carrier, or if they kill the last ball carrier within 0.5 seconds of them having had the ball. pretty much a ballkill. I don't plan on tracking ball carrier damage, nor ball time. Can take a look at the code and track changes here https://bitbucket.org/weasal/powerballmerv/src

So I looked at some old files I had and found some of the old settings values I recorded. These are accurate. SoccerBallThrowTime 700 (7 seconds) SoccerBallProximity 64 (64 pixels) SoccerBallFriction 4 SoccerBallThrowSpeed 4000 Not sure what the values are currently in ?go powerball but i'll have hallu confirm them. Right not the values that aren't exactly correct are the warbird and jav thrust, as well as bullet alive time and damage. Also I updated the map tileset in ?go powerball, waiting on hallu to update it. Here's a screenshot. http://i.imgur.com/8M9dF6V.png

agreed. I looked at alternative forum software and discourse.org looks cool. at the very least we should be able to host something other than IP board with decent hosting for much less than $700 a year. (I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's a real possibility). it's not like this site is getting hit with tons of traffic.

Nope grunt, people tried already and it didn't. edit: also, to make this post a little less useless: next resizer feature that I plan on working on is custom font rendering. which means we will be able to set the chat font to whatever size and font-family (arial, comic sans, times new roman).

yeah I haven't styled or decided on what I wanted to include on the squad list (/squads), or what should be on each squad's page (/squads/gauntlet), same thing goes for /pilots and /pilots/7th. Probably stuff like squad wins and losses, the roster obviously (with ranks kind of like the manage page). i'll keep this post as a list of todo so people have an idea of what's final and what's still a work in progress. SITE TODO: /pilots - sortable list of pilots, sorted by rank/goals/etc/?? will have pagination/pilots/ (individual pilot pages) - rank, graphs (rank over time), goals, goals compared to league average, visual, link to list of pilot's games. aliases, last played at (or should this be last seen?)./pilots//games/squads//squads/ (individual squad pages)/squads//games/squads//history/ or something that lets you view the roster at an exact date in timesquad roster limit - 8/10/12??For squads, let people set a nice squad avatar/image... (still need to decide on best method so people don't abuse and upload porn to server)/games - all games played sorted by date (most recent), with pagination/games/ (like /games/12309429)/league/schedule - schedule by weeks (e.g. WEEK 1: Dropships vs LLamas (default: 4pm Saturday))/league/standings/league// - standings, champion, etc?figure out the best way to do flexible scheduling. (thinking right now: both squad's captains must submit a single time to play 3 days in advance, otherwise it defaults to Saturday or something.)very robust search, search for all games where pilot1 played pilot2, search for all games with 10 assists by one pilot, etc...game reporting, & compute pilot rank/skill change when games are reportedBOT TODO: confirming people's nicks for when they register to the site (!confirm )!next - queuing up in powerball arena, also forces people to register or they will only be able to speckeeping track of games (99% complete*, only need to prettify the game stats output)scoreboard graphics toggling (lvz toggling)aliasing, detect aliases, record stats for alias on main nickteam balancingbot will check schedule everydaybot will automatically handle matches/starting themlosses reported and logged for each team that noshowswhat to do when squads show less than the required amount of players?... probably more I haven't thought of yet*note mervbot doesn't know ballposition when the ball is not being carried -- need asss to log goal shot trajectories. potentially another method too. (tracking ball position is complete, will integrate with stats later)

Ok fixed it. I forgot to do something when I updated the site yesterday and you ended up still being on a deleted squad (I deleted all squads, but never updated pilot's squads, so you were on a squad that didn't exist)

Yes, people who create squads are automatically added to that squad as the admin. You can accept or refuse requests if you're a squad manager for your squad (to be that you have to be a captain or admin on your squad). Let me try to figure out what happened here.

@mindriot concentrating on making it functional before adding extra niceties like a responsive design. i'm totally fine with it being broken on iphones and smaller screen devices for the moment. i program for a hobby so yes i also develop using javascript. thanks for the feedback. i enjoy the game, whether it's me getting owned or u... as long as the ownage is legit, like kill me in a cool way . oh, so creating, leaving, managing, and joining squads is 99.99% complete. go ahead and try it. little bit on how it works: Anyone can create a squad.You can change the name of your squad anytime. Names are not reserved (i.e. if you change your squad name from assassins to fortheluls, someone else can take assassins)I will be confirming that you are the ?squadowner or have the squad tag in game for each squad in the league -- if you don't, you need a diff name.You can only be on one squad at a time. You can leave your a squad at any time (however if you are the admin of the squad with other pilots, you need to ensure there is another admin before you leave).If you leave a squad and it has 0 pilots, it's deleted (unless it has participated in past league games, in that case it is deactivated)Deactivated squads may be reactivated (only by the squad creator -- aka people can bring back squads e.g. sterling/the dark)You can request to join any squad.Squad admins can promote or demote pilots on their squad to captain or even admin.Squad admins and captains can accept or deny squad requests.Admins and captains can kick players of a lower or equal rank off the squad.i will be wiping the database clean when the league officially starts so everyone feel free to help test now. pls.

Hey jinxi, there is definitely some memory mismanagement in the latest version, my fault. I'm working on a couple things right now so any fixes for resizer are on the back burner, but in the meantime go ahead and try version 2.1 or 2.3 and see if those work.

Pistol, have you ever played 4v4 at a high level? When the fuck has shrap done 10 damage after skimming a bomb.

Based on these statements, I think you smoke crack. At the very least, you have no idea about the game mechanics. This description of InactiveShrapDamage applies: http://wiki.minegoboom.com/index.php/Shrapnel_Settings "Damage shrapnel causes in its first 1/4 second of life." It has nothing to do with whether is has bounced or not, nor whether you are in the open or near a wall. After 1/4 second, shrap deals it's 190 damage. Crack kills. So does shrap. Even out in the open. Lol

Little frustrated with that response so excuse me for the rudeness . 5% yada yada. Your ass didn't even talk about why that 5% is significant, you just pointed out that it happens quite a bit over the thousands of games that've been played over the years. Yeah so what? Even in those 5% of cases we're talking about, explain to me what's going on there that's so wrong. How many of those 5% cases are you going to watch and say, yeah man this game is fucked up if we changed this or that setting the situation would've played out more correctly?? I don't care if it happens a million more times, the point is, which you obviously don't get, is that when an indirect does less than a direct, that is due to the situation. Right, i said it once, "circumstantial", bargeld said it another time, "situational". When the situation dictates that the shrap are going to bounce off some nearby walls when you're in an enclosed space and do extra damage, yes, that bomb is going to do a lot of damage. Now what's wrong with that?! Are you going to complain about the fraction of a percent of edge cases where a direct is not going to force a rep or get a kill but an indirect would? "5% is significant when the sample size is hundreds of thousands of games over close to two decades. 5% can contain very important league games. It took you 2 days to respond and you respond by quoting others who you think are pro players, when the fact of the matter is they are middle-skilled. In the future I would hope you could think for yourself, good things can happen." <-- Seriously, does this paragraph contain anything of substance? And I don't know why it matters whether i posted two or three days later.. i saw ur post but didn't have the energy or care enough to respond cause i figured u were trolling. "you respond by quoting others who you think are pro players" I guess i have to make my points explicitly clear cause you don't understand. Dude, their skill level isn't relevant, does it matter if they're the top 2 players or in the middle of the pack or the upper middle? I just quoted 2 other players who try to dodge shrap cause you thought no one does it. Oh and i don't think for myself? Again, i didn't quote them so i could echo what they said, u should've tried to understand rather than firing off some stupid retort. "Alright, that's fine if you think that. But inconsistency is never good for a competitive game. If you want to keep inconsistency, you should acknowledge that "pro" league is nothing but a casual, fun-driven event. You can't pretend it is anything more than that when games can be decided by inconsistencies, and ultimately the end result of all the settings, the rules, and the map, is an environment where highly defensive play can keep the weak much more competitive than they should be." <--- Please explain where i took shit out of context. It looks like you're deriving the conclusion that pro league is casual from your opinion that there's inconsistency. Am i understanding you incorrectly? I had actually wanted you to offer some more inconsistencies since as you said yourself, everyone else is incompetent at judging things except for u!

I think more than enough has been said, but i'm adding this to cover some things that pistol posted. "The perfect shot is not a direct hit, the game's broken": This is the reason for my graph. Yes, <5% of the time the perfect shot is not a direct hit. If you're complaining about this, it's ridiculous. It's the reason why players aim for directs... because they understand that a direct is how they will do the most damage 95% of the time. Pro players don't try to create shrap and pray that the opponent runs into them. "No one tries to dodge shrap, that's ludicrous": Look at what 7th wrote, a pro player, and just read the post above me by plarep, another pro player. Not to be condescending but i was wondering how much 4v4 you played or watched. Pros consider dodging shrap a routine part of their play. 7th even posted that shrap is 190, which is only slightly less than a bullet's damage. People put in the effort to dodge bullets all the time so it's only reasonable that they try to dodge shrap too. "Inconsistent game, so pro league is for teh casuals": You grabbed the snippet about inconsistency out of context then stated that pro league has to be a casual game. I disagree but love to hear your argument for it. Anyway, I can't speak for 7th, but the entire post there is reiterating that shrap is very predictable/consistent and not broken. The part of the game that's bad is lag, and that isn't by design. Again, love to hear your argument spelling out the inconsistent parts of the game.

"Hence if the curves match over a large dataset.... might as well remove shrap..." , wait no! In that case, removing shrap only simplifies the game!If they do match (which I was guessing they would), you would be dumbing down the game by removing shrap.Corners/boxes wouldn't be the same, rep kills and repping into corners wouldn't be the same, dodging and skimming bombs and the CHAOS of chaos 4v4 wouldn't be the same.

If you wanna go by intuition, my intuition says that leave sharp as it is. You're right -- it's very situational, and like you said, good players avoid poor situations like corners. The debate for shrap is so one sided for me I don't even know why this is being discussed.

Obviously we want to form our opinions based on something (like facts and data lol)... bargeld lol.

Exaclty what 7th said. There will be a few outliers** but those will get squashed with enough input data. Again, only my hypothesis. **(like your scenario bargeld, one poorly aimed bomb in a corner might do 1100 with shrap + bomb damage, but usually poorly aimed bombs would do 400 total... so the overall average for poorly aimed bombs might be 450ish). Curves and data don't really matter? Whoa whoa whoa, curves and data are the results, and the results depend on what happens, and what happens matters to me! McLaren was saying something about logical, I pointed out it bomb damage with shrap probably is logical as it is now.

But like I said before McLaren, a perfect shot does do more damage than an indirect. In that situation, that shrap that KO'd me barely hit the edge of my ship, it's not like that always happens everytime you shoot a shit shot. I like numbers so i'd say the ideal way of settling this would be to have a chart of avg. damage dealt vs bomb explode distance over 1000 4v4 games. It would probably be monotonically decreasing (which means 0 distance would have the highest average damage, and as the explode distance gets further away the damage would never increase). avg damage (including damage from shrap) |* | * | * | * | * |____* - . ._ distance my guess!

Other points: yes shark does suck, but it will still suck even if u change the aw cost. Not entirely clear what you suggested with greens... you *want* every one to be one of those 3 right? Well i'm not sure if it's possible but that's sounds like something worth trying.

Takes effort to dodge shrap so I strongly disagree with changing it. Everyone has time to see that a bomb is going to impact and they should have a sense of where it'll explode, so it's possible to control your ship to avoid hitting the shrap that comes out in the 8 directions. Maybe not every time, but it's something that would be considered skillful to do (lets not reduce the skill ceiling in this game, or lower the skill floor). I don't want to simplify the game by making shrap something people are ok with flying into, I like that they do a significant amount of damage. With respect to comparing emps and bombs, I'm curious to know what the exact numbers are for a direct's emp time and by extension the amount of energy you don't get recharged cause of that. Too lazy to figure it out but I would wait before saying anything more. And about the direct doing less than an indirect with shrap, that's very circumstantial (are they in a small space vs out in the open?).